ASI resolution adopted at Party's First Congress

This work to build the African Socialist International is at a new level of development, but we would do well to remember that the ASI is not a new project of our Party. It is work that, when placed in historical perspective, helps us to understand the farsightedness of our Party. It helps us to understand the significance of our Party as the leader of the international African working class, its advanced detachment, that clearly understands the way forward and is preparing itself for the conquest of political power.

This is work that was formally initiated at our Party’s First Congress in 1981. Comrade Chernoh, the ASI Director of Organization, could not have been more than two years old when we passed the resolution for building the ASI, stating in part:

“The African People’s Socialist Party calls on all African revolutionaries in all countries to unite with us into one all-African international socialist association which would enhance our ability to realize our historic mission to free and unite our people and motherland, and to defeat imperialism and issue in a new day of peace, freedom, and world socialism.

“The African People’s Socialist Party calls on all African revolutionaries in all countries to unite with us into one all-African international association, which would assume the tasks of:

“1. Liberating and uniting all of Africa under a single, all-African socialist state;

“2. Uniting, coordinating, and giving general assistance and direction for the revolutionary struggles of all African people wherever they occur and whenever the aims of such struggles are consistent with the aims of the international association;

“3. Achieving the objective consolidation of African nationality for all African people wherever we are oppressed and exploited throughout the world due to the machinations of imperialism.

“Africans of the world, take history into your own hands!

“Africans of the world, unite to build the African Socialist International!”

In the Main Resolution of the Party’s Third Congress in September 1990 we elaborated on the Party’s position that the African Socialist International is our most important strategic task:

“This work to build the African Socialist International will be the central focus of our revolutionary work. It will occur under the slogan: ‘Izwe Lethu i Afrika,’ appropriated from the Pan Africanist Congress of Azania.

“As distinguished from Pan Africanism, which has historically relied principally on the leadership of the African petty bourgeoisie as heads of organizations or illegitimate colonialist-created states for the accomplishment of its aims, the African Socialist International will rely on the social base of conscious Africans organized under the revolutionary leadership of the African working class.

“Thus, as a mobilizing tool, we have also declared at this Congress that this is the ‘era of the worldwide African Revolution and socialist unification of Africa and African people under the leadership of African workers and poor peasants.’

“We must take the question of Africa, its relationship to the structure of the capitalist world economy and our relationship to it to every African community in the world. This is important for a thousand reasons. Africa is suffering with no obvious relief in sight.”

The fact that we determined that our central work would be building the African Socialist International does not mean that the Party is not involved in struggles on the ground everywhere. Our recognition of the African Socialist International as the central, strategic task of our Party does not mean that we are not engaged in struggling around the pressing issues and concerns of the African working class and colonized nation wherever and whenever they occur in the world.

In fact, we see all these struggles against imperialism as schools for enhancing the fighting capacity of our Party, class and colonially oppressed nation. What it does mean is that the work to liberate and unite Africa and African people worldwide, the work that gives significance to the ASI, is our guiding work, the work around which everything else revolves.